The Ghosts of Cannae: Hannibal and the Darkest Hour of the Roman Republic (6 page)

For this was also a time of military adventure and larger-than-life adventurers. The example of Alexander the Great should not be underestimated; he personified to the age’s soldiers of fortune all that was glorious and might be achieved by a general with sufficient courage, audacity, and skill. If Homer’s Helen was said to have launched a thousand ships, then Alexander’s memory set many an army marching down destiny’s road.

Archetypical among Hellenistic condottieri was Pyrrhus, surnamed Eagle, the sometime king of Epirus and full-time opportunist. At seventeen he fought at the battle of Ipsus, the swan song of Antigonus the One-Eyed; spent time with Ptolemy, becoming his son-in-law; meddled in Macedon until, having overstayed his welcome, he was forced back to Epirus and boredom—but not for long. It was at this point, 281 B.C., that he discovered a place for himself in Italy. The Greek city of Tarentum, hard-pressed by the Romans, had extended Pyrrhus an invitation to help them and the rest of Magna Graecia. Within a year the Eagle had landed with twenty-five thousand professional infantry and cavalry, along with twenty of what were considered to be the game-breakers of the Hellenistic force structure, war elephants. As we shall see, the whole concept of a panzer pachyderm was vastly overrated, but for the uninitiated they were truly terrifying. Horses were repelled by their smell, and foot soldiers without special training were terribly vulnerable.

Nonetheless, Pyrrhus appears to have understood he was in for hard fighting, commenting after reconnoitering the Roman camp: “The discipline of these barbarians is not barbarous” (Plutarch, Pyrrhus 16.5). He was right. At the ensuing battle near Heraclea, the Romans stood up well to Pyrrhus’s phalanx, but their cavalry was driven off by his elephants and their wings collapsed, leaving seven thousand dead on the field. It had been costly, but Pyrrhus had clearly won a victory and plainly expected the Romans to seek terms. He even made a dash toward Rome, perhaps expecting some of their allies to desert; none did.
39
Still, he was prepared to be generous; but in the end the Romans rebuffed him. So the next year, 279, he fought them again. This time the Romans held out for two days before Pyrrhus’s phalanx and elephants prevailed, but his losses numbered thirty-five hundred. “If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined” (Plutarch, Pyrrhus 21.9), he was heard to say. But there were no signs of surrender, and at this point he did something very Hellenistic.

The Eagle took wing, answering the call of the Greeks in Sicily, where the Carthaginians appeared to be on the verge of taking over the whole island. In short order Pyrrhus’s army routed the Carthaginians, who characteristically tried to buy him off. He would have none of it. But then he made the mistake of executing two prominent Greeks from Syracuse, and he quickly lost favor. Pyrrhus would return to Italy, where the stubborn Romans finally defeated him near Beneventum (modern Benevento) in 275, and then die two years later in street fighting back in Greece. Pyrrhus’s Alexandrian dreams of conquest had come to nothing. Unlike his foes in the West, he’d lacked staying power. But before he’d departed Sicily, he’d said something very prophetic: “My friends, what a wrestling ground for Carthaginians and Romans we are leaving behind us!” (Plutarch, Pyrrhus, 23.6.) One of them, not a Greek, would inherit the future.

*
Typical Roman names of the late republican period had three elements: a praenomen, or given name (in this case Publius), chosen from a limited list and having no family connotation; a nomen, referring to the
gens
or clan name (Cornelii); and, finally, the cognomen, or family within the clan (Scipio).

*
“Punic” is derived from the Latin
“punicus”
and refers to Carthage and Carthaginians.

II

ROME

[1]

T
he first sign of them coming would have been a high thin dust cloud characteristic of cavalry on the move. This would have been followed by a lower, far denser particulate envelope thrown up by the infantry and its supply transport.
1
The huge army moved slowly southeast toward the flatlands of the Adriatic coast, wary of the kind of ambush that Hannibal had laid for Flaminius and his army at Lake Trasimene. Polybius implies in his history that the Roman leadership had reports that the Carthaginians were already at Cannae, but bitter experience had taught them that Hannibal could show up anywhere.

Not that they were expecting to lose. Despite a string of three shocking defeats, the Roman mood from consul to lowliest of foot soldiers was probably one of grim determination. Setbacks were at the core of their history, but always these setbacks had proved the triggers for eventual victory. If you were a Roman, there was every reason to believe this unfortunate chain of events was but a prelude to success.

Corrective steps had been taken. If anything, during the earlier clashes, Hannibal had held the numerical edge; that was far from the case now. For this occasion the Romans had raised a multitude: a force basically four times larger than a standard consular army, consisting of super-size legions pumped up to five thousand men apiece. Modern sources agree with Polybius’s (3.113.5) estimate that, when cavalry and allied contingents were added, around eighty-six thousand Romans were on their way to Cannae.
2
The very size of this juggernaut said a good deal about its intent. In previous defeats the Roman center had broken through, but too late to prevent the wings from being crushed by Hannibal’s cavalry. This time sheer momentum was intended to carry the day much more quickly—it was not an elegant plan, but it was certainly a reasonable one, given the Roman way of thinking about war. Having drifted into southern Italy, Hannibal was not only far from Carthage and his family’s base in Spain, but he was now hundreds of miles removed from the tribes of Gaul that had proved to be his best source of fresh troops. One significant setback would put an end to his invasion of Italy.

The command structure the Romans had put in place left every impression that the intention was to meet Hannibal and crush him. Fabius Maximus’s strategy of delay and harassment had plainly been rejected in the most recent set of elections, and the consuls put in place, Caius Terentius Varro and Lucius Aemilius Paullus, were (despite Livy’s protestations to the contrary in the latter’s case) committed to a battlefield confrontation.
3
The military tribunes, or legionary commanders, assembled for this army have been shown to be considerably more numerous and experienced than was normally the case.
4
Perhaps most telling of all, between a quarter and a third of the Roman senate had joined the army, and most other senate members had close relatives serving. While some may have been there purely to enhance their careers, many had valuable military experience to impart, and as a whole there is no denying that a very considerable portion of the Roman leadership class had staked their personal futures on the fate of this army.

To drive the point home, through the ranks an unprecedented step had been taken; Livy (22.38.2–5) tells us that for the first time the military tribunes had formally administered an oath to the Roman soldiers and their Latin allies, legally binding them not to “abandon their ranks for flight or fear, but only to take up or seek a weapon, wither to smite an enemy or to save a fellow citizen.” Win, or die in place; there was to be no alternative. This was a hard message and a very Roman one; for the survivors of Cannae, it would shape the next fifteen years of their lives. For the great majority of the army, however, it was less complicated, since they had less than a week to live.

But for now the Romans could reject the notion that they were marching toward disaster, that their plan and the very nature of their army would be turned against them. They were Romans, and the nature of Rome’s society and Roman history had to reassure them that they were heading down the path to victory. So it’s worth looking into these matters in more detail, for it will clarify why these Romans allowed themselves to be ensnared in the trap Hannibal set for them. Looking more closely will also help explain how they could learn from this bitterest of lessons and eventually overcome him.

[2]

The Rome of 216 B.C. was a mass of contradictions, a jumble of paradox, but instead of incoherence its contrariety generated strength and flexibility. Rome was at once stubborn but adaptable. It placed great emphasis on tradition, yet was empirically disposed to change. It was governed by an oligarchy, but cloaked itself in democratic forms. Its state structure was an edifice of jerry-built institutions, which were, nonetheless, functional and resilient. Devoted to the law to the point of legalism, Rome was at heart a society held together by a web of personal patronage—patron-client relationships that stretched far beyond the city walls. For although Rome retained the consciousness of a city-state, it was already something much larger and more expansive. And despite being bound by fetial law, which forbade aggressive war, it was rapaciously devoted to conquest. For those who were defeated, Rome’s startling cruelty coexisted with equivalent acts of magnanimity. And among the defeated, Rome forged a hegemony based on the fiction of alliance, but in the process generated real and tenacious loyalty on the part of the subjugated. Still, in one area Rome was not the least bit conflicted, and that was in its devotion to military power. At rock bottom Rome was a place made by war; warfare was in essence the local industry.

Rome’s economy reflected both the clarity of its military intentions and the ambiguity of its soul. At one level it is safe to call Rome a nation of farmers,
5
not the drudges of irrigated agriculture but small freeholders working the land largely on a subsistence basis. Surpluses were generated and there was some commercialization of agriculture, but the business aspect, especially at the level of symbology and public discourse, was not emphasized. Small farms were valued as morally elevating, and in large part this was because they bred good soldiers and helped the state exert control over conquered territory. Rome had consistently sent out colonies of its landless, and as they had reached into the sophisticated economic environment of Magna Graecia, this migration probably had the effect of lowering economic development. But expanding in this way had made strategic sense and, in theory at least, had increased military manpower—the right kind of manpower, troops toughened by a life of heavy work in the fields.

But as with many things Roman, the story was entirely more complex. In the mid-1960s famed historian Arnold J. Toynbee
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put forth the thesis that Hannibal’s depredations in southern Italy ruined the rural economy and depopulated the area, paving the way for latifundia, or large estates, worked by cheap and abundant slaves. This short-circuited Rome’s cycle of rural virtue. Further inquiry, though, has revealed that Rome was already far down the road to becoming a slave-dependent society at least a century earlier.
7
And as Rome’s success in war accelerated through the period of the three Punic Wars and beyond, so did the number of war captives who were enslaved and sold, the number possibly reaching into the low hundreds of thousands.
8
This was plainly highly lucrative for both the commanders and the state treasury. Meanwhile, among the ranks, the potential for plunder seems to have been an important motivator for erstwhile farmers to turn from their plows and take up their swords.
9
And while it is difficult to estimate what percentage of Rome’s metalworking capacity was devoted to the implements of war, we can probably rest assured that the city’s forges were more likely to beat plowshares into swords than vice versa. There were also profits to be made at home from victualing the army, but this was somewhat beside the point. For the senate customarily expected vanquished adversaries to defray a substantial portion of the cost of the campaigns waged against them, generally in the form of food and matériel.
10
For Rome at least, there is little doubt that war was the health of the state.

Leadership and governance was a similarly deceptive skein of motivation. Earlier, Rome had undergone a complex process of constitutional development, a struggle of the orders in which plebeians (commoners) had gradually gained rights and power from the patriciate (first families), at least formally. In fact, by 216 “plebeian” and “patrician” no longer meant very much; Rome was really ruled by a combination of powerful families from both orders. Just as in George Orwell’s
Animal Farm
, where all pigs are equal, but some are more equal than others, in Rome the people were supreme in all branches of government, but the few and the influential called the shots.
11
Thus in the three major assembled bodies besides the senate, the Comitia Centuriata, the Comitia Tributa,
*
and the Concilium Plebis,
†
the popular membership could only vote for or against a measure, not debate it. Plus, in the first of these, the Comitia Centuriata, which had the key roles of voting to declare war, to accept peace terms, and to elect the major magistrates (consuls, praetors, and censors), the membership was stacked in a way that reflected an archaic military order that allowed a relatively few wealthy members to have a near majority. Further entrenching the roots of privilege was the patron-client system that underlay so much of Rome’s social order: if you were wise, you did not vote to bite the hand that fed you. This is significant to our story because Livy in particular seeks to tag some of Hannibal’s most notorious consular victims—Caius Flaminius and Terentius Varro—as somehow “popular leaders,” elected over the good judgment of Rome’s betters.
12
Contemporary sources view this as hogwash; given the electoral mechanisms at the time, neither Flaminius nor Varro could have been voted into office without the support of powerful elements of the nobility.

Real decision-making resided elsewhere, and that was in the senate. But as was characteristic of Rome, the senate’s clout was based on influence, not formality. This body governed through custom, not law; it had seized preeminence on its own initiative rather than through constitutional enactment.
13
Normally senators served for life and numbered around three hundred, regulated by censors, who periodically revisited the rolls. Drawn mainly from the rural gentry, members also comprised all former key magistrates elected to administer the Roman republic.

This was important because some senators were plainly more equal than other senators. Power here was a matter of central position, and at the core was an inner circle of families that possessed ancestors who had risen to consular rank. These
nobiles
were the true movers and shakers and they belonged to an exclusive club—between 223 and 195 B.C., only five new families managed to climb to this highest rung. Meanwhile, Fabii, Cornelii, Claudians, Aemilii, Atilii, and a handful of other great houses continued to dominate the senate, which in turn dominated the state, particularly in the areas of finance and foreign affairs.

But how and in what direction? This is controversial. Until recently, historians tended to believe that specific policies could be associated with factions grouped around certain key families, and that these associations were consistent over several generations. While this concept was attractive analytically, it was not supported by the ancient sources and has lost favor.
14
Still, while senatorial politics were likely more fluid than earlier assumed, it remains possible to see policy factions coalescing around key figures over the short term, who likely represented a great family with numerous supporters. Hence it is plausible to think of Fabians, led by Fabius Maximus, as being consistently disposed toward caution, while the Cornelian element, personified by Scipio Africanus, can be viewed as predisposed toward aggressively confronting Hannibal.
15

In more general terms senatorial dominance is easier to explain. Unlike the other assembled bodies, it met continuously and not just when the powers that be decided it was time to vote on something important. Not only was discussion ongoing, but the senate was Rome’s abiding repository of leadership. Unless disgraced or otherwise disqualified, all senators serving in a specific office, such as the consulship, would eventually go back to the general membership of the senate. Thus it became customary for consuls to refer all important matters back to their predecessors. Similarly, magistrates were expected to follow the body’s advice, particularly when it was formally expressed in a senatus consultum, even though, in typically Roman fashion, the senate did not have the power to legislate. It would have taken a bold magistrate to cross an institution where he would have to serve for life after his term of office ended.
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